


Dead World

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: End of the World, Horror, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-31
Updated: 2008-10-31
Packaged: 2018-01-01 07:19:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you're reading this you've either saved me or you were too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead World

The riots get worse. So does the looting. Anymore, it isn’t safe to go out on the streets. And maybe this was the start of it all. Or maybe this was all a long time coming. Maybe it started with the economy – it got to the point where nobody could afford anything and nobody was being paid and the unemployment rate was running parallel to the homelessness rate, both of which were higher than forty percent.

After that it was dog-eat-dog. Literally. And it wasn’t a surprise to go into any store anywhere and be held up in a robbery. Everywhere was a mess of high, razor-wire fences with metal detectors inside the doors of any official buildings because people kept pulling out guns and knives.

A week before it happened a woman was walking her kids to school when a guy jumped her. He bludgeoned her kids to death with a hammer and robbed her, leaving her lying on the street covered in blood and clutching her dead children and screaming and screaming and screaming. A few days later she drove by the school her kids used to attend and sprayed the place down with a machine gun.

Blood stains everything. Not even acid rain can wash away some things.

Who’d have thought?

So maybe this…this thing is just a sort of natural selection deal. Maybe God just got sick of us fucking up the planet and decided to put everybody to the test. Survival of the fittest. You know? Darwin, and how the old and the dying and the lame will get left behind.

It’s no big deal, though. Everybody dies.

Or they did.

Death, now, isn’t so much about pearly gates and heaven and hell. It’s about an insatiable hunger, and never, ever getting tired. It’s about tearing through the streets at night, and clawing at the locked doors of family homes until your finger nails tear from your skin and, even then, they don’t stop.

I’ve forgotten what the sun looks like.

It’s day, whatever, twenty, and all I want to do is see the sun rise. I want to feel the rain soak me to the skin. I want to go outside and breathe air that doesn’t smell like fifteen other people and their shit and their food. I want to go back in time, and I want to make it home to Arizona to see my family, my parents, before this happened.

Where I am. Where we are, is California. A house that belonged to a family that got their throats ripped out by the infected and left before we got here. The people I am with aren’t anybody I’ve ever met before. And we’re all planning who we’re going to kill first when the food starts running low.

I was at work when the sirens started. At first it was nothing but a low howl, then it grew to a chilling wail. We all knew what it meant – get out of the city. The government installed these sirens months ago and everybody went a bit nuts with worry but on the news they assured us they were only going to be used when the situation hit ‘crisis point’. We guessed the rioting had gotten worse, that maybe there had been a prison break. And we ran. I grabbed as much money from my register as I could fit in my pockets and I ran.

Everywhere there were families piling into cars; people throwing each other out of the way to get into cabs. People were crying and screaming, and all I remember was thinking, is this the end of the world?

I was heading home. I had to pack. I was planning on running as far as I could until I could hitch a ride to Arizona. My mom, she’d be worried. The rioting wasn’t so bad there yet, and I figured I’d be safe. As I approached my apartment building somebody started running toward me. I stopped moving and watched them. They were covered in blood and seemed frantic.

I couldn’t move. This person was probably going to rob me, and I couldn’t move. As they raced closer toward me I saw the chunks of flesh missing from her arms and her face and her neck and the blood smeared all over her dirty face and I knew to run. I spun on my heel and headed in the other direction, running until my lungs burned and I was lost somewhere in Hollywood.

From where I stood trying to catch my breath I could see the Hollywood sign, and even from a distance I could see the blood smeared across it, and the shadowy figures of people running, falling, throwing each other down the hill.

All around me were cars sitting bumper to bumper and blaring their horns. And in the distance the figures grew closer. So I ran. Everywhere I turned there seemed to be more. It could have been any house, I could have been running into anything. But I saw a girl with a long blonde braid running toward it and I followed her.

She tried to slam the door in my face. I thought about Rapunzel and yelled at her. “Let me in, bitch, or I’ll make sure I bite you when they get me.”

Nice guys finish last. And Rapunzel let me in.

Inside there were already ten other people, huddled in the corner in the dark, watching us. For a few hours outside all we could hear was screaming over the wail of the sirens in the distance, and then everything went silent.

I was falling asleep when the first survivor started banging on the door and screaming for help. After him two more followed. They had bags full of stole supplies. One of them had guns. And they all said they same – outside everybody was dead.

The cars were still on the street with their engines running, bumper-to-bumper with all the doors open and the dead either ran off somewhere or slumped in the seats of the car, still strapped in and ready to escape.

We boarded up the windows. At first the little girl who didn’t speak English cried and cried about being in the dark, but Rapunzel sang her a lullaby in a different language and stroked her hair. I guess if I’d been more of a people-person I’d have given a shit, but to be honest her crying was driving me nuts.

And now it’s day whatever, twenty. The candles are running low, so mostly we eat in the dark. The food won’t last forever, and the little foreign girl will probably put up the least fight when we try to cave her head in. I always used to laugh at survival stories of families trapped up in the mountains who eat each other to stay alive.

I used to laugh at zombie movies.

And at people who were scared of the dark.

It’s funny. How things change.

It’s day twenty, and the sun will have set by now. It could be all in my head, but I’m sure I can hear clawing at the front door. I’m sure I can hear the dragging of heavy limbs out on the street.

I’m writing this for somebody to find sometime. Maybe the government, since they abandoned us. Maybe the army who didn’t search the residential areas. Anymore, I don’t know if we’re not the only ones still alive. But not for long.

It’s November twentieth, two thousand fourteen.

If you’re reading this you’ve either saved me or you were too late.


End file.
